Monday, June 23, 2014

The nation is a long way from consensus on these questions, judging by the response to a federal ruling that the “Redskins” team name is disparaging and its trademarks should be canceled. ...

Some offenses are undeniable: Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers pro basketball team, earned universal condemnation for asking his mistress not to bring black people to his games.

Really? So everybody thinks that Sterling should be okay with his mistress bringing dates into his basketball arena?

I only heard part of the recording, but my understanding is that the mistress only asked about black men as dates. Sterling never said that he approves of whites or other races either openly dating his mistress. The mistress was the one who seemed to have a preference for black men, and who seemed to make a racial issue out of it.

I am not expressing any opinion here. I am just noting what offends people. I don't even know why anyone would consider the term "Redskins" offensive, and the article does not explain. I have never heard it used as a disparaging term. Perhaps some people are ashamed to have reddish skin, I don't know.

The main explanation I heard for Sterling was that the NBA is considered a black-majority league, and therefore black men should get to date the Jewish owner's mistress.

On an unrelated matter, This Ethiopia traffic video is amazing. No traffic lights, no signs, no lane markings, chaos. and continuous near accidents.

Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, is only the latest in a long line of works arguing that humans can be divided into discrete races, and that between those races, there are differences in behavior, temperament, intelligence, and even political and economic structures. Although the specifics of the arguments change, what remains constant is the idea that white people of European descent are inherently smarter, better, more “civilized” than members of other races, especially black Africans and their descendants. Wade’s work is no exception.

That is a gross distortion, of course. Wade replies to a similar charge:

Let's start with Raff, who asserts, "Wade claims that the latest genomic findings actually support dividing humans into discrete races." In fact, I say the exact opposite, that the races are not and cannot be discrete or they would be different species, but it's easier to attack an invented statement.

Likewise, the colors of the rainbow are real and continuous. You can give discrete and useful definitions of colors, even tho there will be colors on the border between red and orange. Genes are discrete, but race involve 100s of genes.

The SPLC makes no attempt to rebut any of Wade's facts or science, and instead launches into a guilt-by-association character assassination:

Wade is a NY Times science writer, and his book is mostly a summary of science stories that have appeared in the newspaper. The NY Times is the most respected newspaper of the Jewish left, and obviously not part of some far-right conspiracy.

The SPLC article is in its "Hatewatch blog", which has the main purpose of showing how much the SPLC and its rich Jewish donors hate the "Radical Right". The article quotes “hatred toward all things European is normative among a great many strongly identified Jews.” And normative at the SPLC, I guess.